Enter Rush Limbaugh. While the famed broadcaster was right in apologizing for labeling Fluke a “slut” and “prostitute,” there’s no need to apologize for slutty and prostitutional behaviors that want public subsidy to pay for controlling the outcomes.

Except… Sandra’s testimony is radically different than what Limbaugh was saying it was. She was talking about women with health conditions, married women, and poor women, not sexually addicted women… which even Wallace alludes to:

Rather than raising up prophets who can confront cultural toxicity, many of the institutions are producing accommodationists who encourage society to acclimate itself by taking in low doses of the “slutty” and “prostitutional” until it can stomach public funding for sexual addiction.

Sandra Fluke(2/29): I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraception coverage in its student health plan. Just as we students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously affiliated hospitals and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens….

On a daily basis, I hear from yet another woman…who has suffered financial, emotional, and medical burdens because of this lack of contraceptive coverage….

Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. Forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy.One told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn’t covered, and had to walk away because she couldn’t afford it. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception. Just last week, a married female student told me she had to stop using contraception because she couldn’t afford it any longer. Women employed in low wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.

____________

Rush Limbaugh (2/29): A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control….Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage. Apparently,four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke’s research shows.”

Can you imagine if you’re her parents how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be? Your daughter goes up to a congressional hearing conducted by the Botox-filled Nancy Pelosi and testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pope. “‘Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported. It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

“‘Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,’ Fluke told the hearing. $3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex — and, she wants us to pay for it.”…You guys who are thinking you’re not gonna go to college? Let me just say one thing to you: Georgetown. They’re admitting before congressional committee that they’re having so much sex they can’t afford the birth control pills!

____________

Kathy Gill at The Moderate Voice (3/2): Birth control pills are often prescribed to treat medical conditions such as ovarian cysts. Once-upon-a-time they were prescribed to help with debilitating monthly cramps (personal experience) and excessive bleeding (friends’ experiences).

Traditional birth control pills cost less than $80 a month, but the Ortho Evra birth control patch (contraception) costs about $80-100 per month in Washington, DC zip code 20002. The patch delivery system is much more reliable (you change it once/week) than birth control pills (which you must take daily). Because it’s a transdermal patch, the dose is lower (safer) because stomach acid isn’t involved. Here’s a list of female contraception; and here’s GoodRX, which allows you to look at prices by zip code.

Since we’re talking about contraception, why not revisit this proposal from two years ago, a proposal that just went into effect in Australia (sorta). Make the 50-year-old birth control pill OTC. Over-the-counter. That should bring the price down tout de suite.

____________

Sandra Fluke (2/29): You might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Women’s health clinics provide vital medical services, but as the Guttmacher Institute has documented, clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing and women are being forced to go without. How can Congress consider the Fortenberry, Rubio, and Blunt legislation that would allow even more employers and institutions to refuse contraceptive coverage and then respond that the non-profit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis, particularly when so many legislators are attempting to defund those very same clinics?

These denials of contraceptive coverage impact real people. In the worst cases, women who need this medication for other medical reasons suffer dire consequences. A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome and has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown insurance because it’s not intended to prevent pregnancy. Under many religious institutions’ insurance plans, it wouldn’t be, and under Senator Blunt’s amendment, Senator Rubio’s bill, or Representative Fortenberry’s bill, there’s no requirement that an exception be made for such medical needs. When they do exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose aren’t, a woman’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.

In sixty-five percent of cases, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed these prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms. For my friend, and 20% of women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription, despite verification of her illness from her doctor. Her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay, so clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy. After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore and had to stop taking it. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of her final exam period she’d been in the emergency room all night in excruciating pain. She wrote, “It was so painful, I woke up thinking I’d been shot.” Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary.On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she sat in a doctor’s office.Since last year’s surgery, she’s been experiencing night sweats, weight gain, and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She’s 32 years old. As she put it: “If my body indeed does enter early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no chance at giving my mother her desperately desired grandbabies, simply because the insurance policy that I paid for totally unsubsidized by my school wouldn’t cover my prescription for birth control when I needed it.” Now, in addition to potentially facing the health complications that come with having menopause at an early age– increased risk of cancer, heart disease, and osteoporosis, she may never be able to conceive a child.

Perhaps you think my friend’s tragic story is rare. It’s not. One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but it can’t be proven without surgery, so the insurance hasn’t been willing to cover her medication. Recently, another friend of mine told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome. She’s struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified to not have access to it. Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown’s policy, she hasn’t been reimbursed for her medication since last August. I sincerely pray that we don’t have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously.

This is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends. A woman’s reproductive healthcare isn’t a necessity, isn’t a priority. One student told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered, and she assumed that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handled all of women’s sexual healthcare, so when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.

Like this:

Janet Mefferd joins with Limbaugh on suggesting that Fluke and other woman who favor insurance coverage (much of which they will pay a portion of their salary for) are focused only on free sex, paid for by the Government:

Democrats said the amendment, over at Politico, was too broad and would’ve been an attack on women’s health. Women’s health, women’s health…. It’s just like Sandra Fluke from yesterday when we were playing audio of that girl from Georgetown who was weeping, well I don’t know if she was weeping, but she was whining at least, you can say she was whining, to Nancy Pelosi and company.

‘Oh, all my friends are going broke at Georgetown Law School because we can’t afford birth control and we spent $3,000 over the course of our law school career on birth control’—$3,000?—‘We just can’t afford it and you need to pay for it, this is about women’s health.’ And of course everybody on the side of common sense is saying, you know what Sandra Fluke and company, nobody’s making you do it, nobody’s making you do it, you’re not asking for some sort of help with cancer drugs, you’re not asking for some sort of help with getting nitroglycerin pills for your heart condition, we would be moved, we would be very sympathetic, we would care, we would find some way to help if this were some dire emergency and you couldn’t afford it.

I got off the air yesterday as we were playing the clips of Sandra Fluke and her whining about needing taxpayers to cover her birth control and I thought; do you not have families? Whatever happened to the concept of a family? I guess that’s a broader issue we should tackle at another time in more detail, and we do talk about the family quite a bit as Christians as we ought to, but have you noticed increasingly the people on the left when they want someone or something to solve their problems it’s always the government, it’s always you, they always want to rob Peter to pay Paul, they always want to take the buck out of your pocket and apply it to whatever need they trump up.

Does anybody have a family anymore? Does anybody have anybody who they’re related to, who they could turn to in a moment of crisis and say ‘hey dad, I just can’t afford my contraception’? Of course not, I would think most people would never do that because it’s too embarrassing and it’s out of line or maybe they don’t have a father, I get all the objections, but why does the government always have to be the go-to-guy?

And it’s not even the government, that’s not even the right way of saying it, because we’re a government of the people, we the people are the people who are running this country, it’s not some king, we don’t live in a theocracy and we’re all going begging for bread from Obama, but that’s what these people are conditioned to do.

You have done a wonderful job Left in training the kids on how to be dependent on you and how to come to brother government and say, ‘please, give me another handout, I just don’t think I can do it on my own, I can’t afford my birth control, you need to pay for it.’ Wrong. Tough love baby, tough love. If you want to go out and fornicate, you need to pay for it.

If I were to get birth control for my wife, through my insurance, I might not have to pay a co-pay, but I would have still have to pay some portion of my insurance premium. The government, then, is not paying for birth control, but me and my employer. Further, listen to Fluke’s testimony and see what she is actually talking about.

For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line? If this is accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running to keep fit? In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone’s bedroom nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level.

My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”

Like this:

Limbaugh either is off his medication or on some serious stuff. Earlier this week, he called a young woman who spoke to Congress a, well…

What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. (here)

Mike Zullo, Arpaio’s lead investigator, said his team believes the Hawaii Department of Health has engaged in a systematic effort to hide from public inspection any original 1961 birth records it may have in its possession.

“Officers of the Hawaii Department of Health and various elected Hawaiian public officials may have intentionally obscured 1961 birth records and procedures to avoid having to release to public inspection and to the examination of court-authorized forensic examiners any original Obama 1961 birth records the Hawaii Department of Health may or may not have,” Zullo said.

This is the theory of motivated reasoning in action. No matter what, people will not believe what they don’t want to believe. No amount of facts or evidence will actually satisfy their conspiracies.